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mental and bodily laborers, to the exclusion of representatives of capital. If this future legislation through laborers for the exclusive benefit of labor is to be successful, we must not indulge in any illusions like that which now seems to have a hold upon the mind of the majority, to wit.: "That Capital and Labor should be in harmony." By that term "Capital" now-a-days private capital is understood. But it is an illusion, a dangerous mistake to suppose that private capital and labor could ever be in harmony. Private capital is a beast of prey that lives and thrives solely on human flesh and blood, on the substance of wages laborers. How can beasts of prey live in harmony with their victims? How can legal robbers and the robbed have the same interests? How can, then, a system of Co-operation become universal before the system of capitalist robbery and legislation is abolished? How can laborers, the great majority of whom are more and more reduced to slow starvation, undertake a successful competition in productive industry with the great capitalistic producers, or their giant monopolies? They never can do it, unless they have the legislative and executive powers of the state on their side; and even then they can do it only if their laws are calculated to utterly abolish the system of private capitalism.
Let us well understand what the "abolition of private capital" (or wages slavery) means. If to-day, by some miracle or revolution, all the great private capitalists and their companies could be removed from our country, would we to-morrow be any poorer for all that? No, we should be richer. They could remove only their persons which we now must feed, house, clothe, and protect, at the outlay of at least two-thirds of our labor product—these two-thirds we should thenceforth keep for ourselves. They could take along also all their legal titles to property within our borders, such as titles to land, mortgages, shares in moneyed institutions, policies, and the like, but all this is a sham value, worth nothing anywhere else, unless we pay interest on it, that is to say, unless we work at wages which are two-thirds two low, or, unless we work two-thirds of our time for lazy people. They could also take along their clothes and finery, diamonds, jewelry, coaches, and coach horses, their gold and silver money. But what of it—as much gold and silver money as we should want we could soon have dug from our mines. They could not take along what no human labor can create—lands, air, water, and sunshine; they could not take along what the accumulated labor of all mankind has created—Sciences, Arts, improvements of the soil, the laboring force of all of us, and all the means of labor, such as buildings, establishments, machines, con-
